Monthly Archives: March 2014

You can find the text for Master R’s Most Holy TrinosofiaChapterFive, above in the title-bar page: Trinosofia Texts. Here – slightly abridged in a few places – is Manly P.Hall’s commentary on this section:

“The candidate next experienced the mystery of the airy or intellectual principle. He is raised out of the subterranean depths by his guardian spirit and lifted into the higher atmosphere. Below him is the desert. Special attention is called to triangular masses – the pyramids.

“An early manuscript in our collection affirms that the Egyptians were able to manufacture the Philosophers’ Stone without artificial heat, by burying the retort in the desert sand, which furnished the exact temperature for alchemical experiments.

“The desert is here a symbol for the aridity and unproductivity of the unawakened consciousness. In the physical universe, spiritual values languish; yet in the midst of this mortal sphere stand the pyramids, supreme symbols of spiritual alchemy – temples of initiation in the desert of waiting.

Copied from Eliphas Levi’s ‘History of Magic’. 27 years ago, when I saw and read about these, in the chapter on Hermes, I was stirred with an elder, unknown and undying knowledge, half covered by the sands.

“It is significant that the atmosphere of Egypt is particularly conducive to the perpetuation of ancient monuments of learning which, when moved from their old footings, rapidly crumble away. Thus material life, the desert, is a natural laboratory in which the supreme chemistry is accomplished through suffering and aspiration.”

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To which I add: the old alchemical texts refer to coction – that of a hen’s warm breast to her egg – in the First Matter. It is the interior temperature of our physical body. Our life is this constant process of transmutation. If we keep the inner fire banked and gentle, it gestates Life, rather than blaze up and consume what it creates. In the arts of Alchemy, we regulate our passions. As Master R has said elsewhere, tiny things – a spore of yeast, the pip in a grape – generate a field of wheat, a vineyard, a transformative Universe.

Further: the desert suggests aridity, but also the ancient and elemental matrix of all life – our body – to which the Life returns. Those who yearned to live the spiritual Life, walked out into the desert and their learning came with the wind, the sand and the stars.

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“The desert” is our primordial physical body in which the sky and stars are planted root and shoot: the leaves, loaves, fishes and our children.

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MPH’s commentary continues (see the journey itself in the Trinosofia Texts page above) : – “The account of the rising and falling of the candidate through space relates to the alternations of the substances in the retort by which they pass through a cycle of attenuation and precipitation, to be finally drawn off through the neck of the vessel. Hermes uses this figure to set forth the mystery of rebirth, the periodic alternation of the soul from a temporal to a sidereal condition, and its final liberation through initiation. Reaching the upper extremity of the intellectual sphere, the candidate is incapable of further function and swoons.”

Genesis in retort – from Alexander Roob’s ‘Alchemy & Mysticism’

The adepts, like Master R, are able to regulate their “density” so that it takes form with our own. Thus they seem to appear and disappear through death, and to migrate or occupy levels of frequency, like electronic orbits in the atom. If we look inside our mind, our thoughts are nothing other than this way. The wearer of a body of Light moves his or her thought intentionally through several planes to converse at will.

MPH continues: “Upon regaining consciousness, he discovers himself to be invested with a starry garment … By the starry garment is represented not only the auric body, but the new universal aspect of being – the Sidereal consciousness bestowed by … initiation. The candidate may return to the narrowness of his physical environment, but he can never again reduce his consciousness to the limitations of the material state. The starry body is his regenerated and illumined intellect.”

As the sand in the desert, as the cells in our body, so are the stars and galaxies of our origin. Remembrance of this is initiation, and treats its fellow hosts with respect and love.

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Altar, Bird, Torch illustration

MPH: “The strange characters signifying the name of the bird with the green branch are decoded to mean ‘To be given the Life.’ The name of the altar reads ‘The Crown, Kether’, and is decoded, ‘when shall be the gate of entrance’. Together the two phrases mean: ‘Immortality shall be conferred at the gate of the House of Wisdom.’ The name of the torch is Light, but translates to: ‘The dernier shall be hidden away and forgotten.'”

The dernier is a coin, and MPH refers this to the Tarot Suit of Coins – the material body. The hidden light is in our body and its un-conceived origin. “The body of the wise man shall be concealed.”

“The tombs of the Initiates have never been discovered, and in the famous Rosicrucean cemetery, the resting places of the Brothers are marked only by the Rose … The personal ego must die or be buried, that the Universal Self may be born from its seed.”

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Gallery – Various forms of the Rose

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Manly P Hall now analyses the illustration (see below):

“The strange bird hovering above the altar fire is the sacred Ibis, symbol of Thoth the Egyptian god of wisdom and letters, and patron of alchemy. The volatile philosophical Mercury can remain in a suspended state only ‘when in the midst of the flames’.

“By the philosophical Mercury, we must understand the regenerated principle of intellect – mind rendered luminous by the flame of inspiration.

“In its beak the bird carries a green branch, the acacia of Freemasonry – symbol of rebirth and immortality. The black feet and wings signify earth, the silvery body is water, the red head is fire, and the golden neck is the airy principle. The spiritual bodies of the elements are thus united in a philosophical creature, the bird of the wise men – the phoenix.”

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Note: instead of a lotus, I painted the Hebrew SHIN, the Mother-letter of sacred Fire – whose symbol is also a molar tooth.

Manly P Hall continues:

“Beside the bird and the altar is an elaborate candlestick, its base formed of twisted serpents – Ida and Pingala? The upper end of the candlestick terminates in a lotus blossom from which rises a lighted taper – the soul light, the inner light which reveals the secrets of the bird.

“As man’s external existence is lighted by an external sun, by which he perceives all temporal concerns, so his internal existence is illuminated by the light of the soul, the radiance of which renders visible the workings of the divine mind within.

“An inscription beneath it reads, ‘To the strong is given the burden.’ The great truths of life can be conferred only upon those who have been tested in character and understanding. The reader is instructed to kindle a fire upon the high place, that the sacrifice may be borne upward to the Desired One.

“The symbolism is borrowed from elder Jewish ceremonials. Upon the altar of burnt incense a fire continually burned. The fire of holy aspiration consumes the base elements of the body and transforms them into soul qualities, symbolised by the incense fumes. These ascend … as the covenant between aspiring humanity and its Creator.

“‘When the years of this existence are done, and the soul outbreathing at death, approaches the gate of immortality, may the Bird bear it swiftly away to the abode of the wise.’

In the Egyptian rites, the soul of the Initiate departed in the form of a bird which hovers over the couch on which the mummy lies. The soul bird with the green branch … confers immortality, as set forth in ‘The Book of the Dead’. Without wisdom, the soul must perish with the body. This is the secret of the ritual of the Coming Forth by Day, or the Breathing Out of the Ka.

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Meanwhile, my parallel journey continues with Jung’s Red Book; for at this point he begins – like Master R’s Initiate – to enter the desert. In the desert, he will encounter some strange characters and “letterings”.

The initial painting which heads the Red Book’s previous chapter was a mosaic of interior earth and stone and star, bright colour. The painting for Chapter 4, The Anchorite – (and they get larger) – is a temple Window – a mandala with four gates. The two concentric frames contain a formal maze of hieroglyphic Runes which substantiate and support Jung’s interior vision from now on. They resemble Celtic knots, but they are living Runes – reddish brown on a light brown raw-sienna background. In the centre is a sky blue square containing the golden letter D.

What is a Rune? A symbol hieroglyph that has power to speak, and to arrange the tides and the leaves of life, to pronounce a fate. The old wizard remembers and casts the Runes. They are created through his “drawing hand”.

In Black Book 3, Jung noted: “All kinds of things lead me far away from my scientific endeavour, which I thought I had subscribed to firmly. I wanted to serve humanity through it, and now, my soul, you lead me to these new things.

“Yes, it is the in-between world, the pathless, the manifold-dazzling. I forgot that I had reached a new world, which had been alien to me previously. I see neither way nor path. What I believed about the soul has to become true here, namely that she knows her own way better, and that no intention can prescribe her a better one. I feel that a large chunk of science has been broken off.

“I suppose it must be like this, for the sake of the soul and her life. I find the thought that this must occur only for me, agonizing, and that perhaps no one will gain insight from my work. But my soul demands this achievement. I should be able to do this just for myself without hope – for the sake of God. This is truly a hard way. But what else did those anchorites of the first centuries of Christianity do? And were they the worst or least capable of those living at the end? Hardly, since they came to the most relentless conclusions with regard to the psychological necessity of their time. They left wife and child, glory and science – and turned toward the desert – for God’s sake.”

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Finally – Master R’s (St-Germain) first Violin Sonata, composed in London in the 1750s:

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Aquariel – an angel of the waters and of the air through the woods of life.

The past-life tendency is an inherited “cosmos connection” – as ancient as the Sahara desert rock formations: the script of valuable objects and humanities. Cosmos is an ordered and creative universe.

Jung wrote The Red Book during the Great War. Philemon teaches him that saturation is the only cure: “They will all become terribly enraptured by these tremendous experiences, and in their blindness will want to understand them as outer events … May the frightfulness become so great that it can turn mens’ eyes inward so that their will no longer seeks the self in others, but in themselves…

“The God develops through the union of the (separate) principles in me. He is their union. If you will one of these principles, so you are in one, but far from your being in the other. If you will both principles, one and the other, then you excite the conflict between the principles, since you cannot want both at the same time. From this arises the need, the God appears in it, he takes your conflicting will in his hand, in the hand of a child whose will is simple and beyond conflict. You cannot learn this, it can only develop in you. You cannot will this, it takes the will from your hand and wills itself. Will yourself, that leads to the way …”

Isaiah – a little child shall lead them: an early drawing that my father has – the child carries a snake I think, and leads all the beasts.

Isaiah 1958

“The spirit of the depths clutched the fate of man unto itself, as it clutched mine. He leads mankind through the river of blood to the mystery. In the mystery man himself becomes the two principles, the lion and the serpent.”

That reminds me of my early dream of a bloody garden, the bloody birth, when I was very small. The similar feeling, and the committed, curious, concerned toil.

Ez Haim – the Tree of Life

I have a mini-cosmos to turn to and copy and absorb into my arteries: the wisdom, the path which opens, and which I have an ineradicable instinct to honour and record. It was the same, studying the BOTA alchemy lessons, and before that, Kabbalah … always the lens, enlivened by relationships in the ground.

I feel myself in the sea now, like the drinking glass – not analytical, but noticing. Swimming like Mercury in the salt: that is Hod in Binah: pause to take it in.

Hermes in the sea – from Roob’s alchey & mysticism

And who is I? Why this special I? – the centre of it all, who has the responsibility to keep the world going, even as you do, and as the man across the road does, and God does? Here is the headlong Mystery. Look for my self! the opening treasure.

And why am I “right”? All my references? They support my ego vessel with all its pretty patches in the waves. My vessel looks rather like the Kon Tiki raft. It is just the way things are – without neti neti affectations. I am rarely wrong, but I am often excessive; and that is self correcting. There is balance and buoyancy in the end. There can only be balance and buoyancy.

Kon Tiki

Mention of Kon Tiki pulls up the feel of balsa wood, historically, balsa rafts crossed the Pacific on the Humboldt; and the new Norwegian voyagers poked their fingers into the soggy balsa, pulled off bits, and glumly watched them sink, and wondered how soon the raft would sink – but the porous went only half an inch or so into the logs. Out of balsa I made small boats and ships … very soft light wood. Soft wood and enormous fishes.

For some reason I am now livingly, balsa wood and fish. The elemental combination and texture pleases me. Balsa gets soaked but floats: the great fish is lord of the deep and can go anywhere, but only floats if it is dead. The little balsa raft felt often nervous of those playful great fish and their curious pokes and plunges.

The raft is the personal self: the great fish are the ocean Self. It is satisfying. The wood and the water have to be the way they are.

Balsa boat 1962 – Annapurna in cumulus clouds

Surrender is how Yeshua felt, in Nature’s miracle of the loaves and fishes. Surrender is vast, amazed, and consenting. I retain a curious sense that my heart is healed, smooth and whole. Rosicruceans drew emblems of the heart in all kinds of tests and trials. I have one of those books downstairs. Writing leads to bliss.

Maria: By all, through all – Rosicrucean emblem 2

And what Jung writes (concluding the Red Book’s Part One) about becoming the Christ for the redeeming blood to flow: that love is sighted but pleasure is blind … is so profound and close to me there is no point in copying it. He says “Both principles are one in the symbol of the flame. The principles strip themselves of human form.”

The flame is the inner heart, the organ of life, the “Everlasting” – the everlasting is mentioned in the snake cup sword picture – see previous post – in its inscription. It smells like a rose.

He concludes: “The mystery showed me in images what I should afterward live. I did not possess any of those boons that the mystery showed me, for I still had to earn all of them.” Those words flare into illumination and Life. To repeat them is my way of “I love you, I know you”. And temples happen.

ship anchor, Rosicrucean Emblem 1

Yes. I wanted to say, earlier, that the Self-root, the moving I … the pilgrim’s search for it in the sea … is not found in isolation, for it is relationship, and always flowing into dialogue: the other as I. Thus my projections when on land. When we are in the Self, long moments open where there is no concern with I or me: it is the passage of the Creative in the I Ching Earth-receptive. And all manner of things illustrate the fundamental love letter, fleetingly and sometimes enduring. The bliss is when we arrive at the clear Principle.

“Too many still seek outward. But still too few seek inward, to their own selves, and still fewer ask themselves whether the ends of human society might not best be served if each man tries to abolish the old order in himself, and to practice in his own person and in his own inward state those precepts, those victories which he preaches at every street-corner, instead of always expecting these things of his fellow men.”

Why does the love flow with Jung when I hear that? Why do I want to shout to him as loud as possible I HEAR YOU, so I write it down for Heaven to see again? Why do I love the Maestro of the collective subconscious? And am I not lodging it with him? Shouldn’t I investigate interiorly, deeper still?

Conversation and hearing each other is human wellbeing, intimacy and bliss. I’ve been following him with Elijah and Salome for weeks: the bases of the pillars of Solomon – forethought and pleasure; their taoist weave. All I hold in my mind, is the picture of Elijah in blue and Salome in red – each others’ tones: the pilgrim is dressed in white, and the snake is black.

The mind holds visual encounters, rather than words. The mind has meetings, cliffs of fall. The mind is the fish of the sea. The mind is a mansion, meeting, kissing, reflecting, passing. Who am I? Never need the answer, for there isn’t one; just ask. The bindhu opens – the heart of the mystery opens and never ends. Beauty.

Sr Chakra Yantra

Sri Chakra lovers lotus

“The God holds love in his right, forethinking in his left. Love is on our favourable side, forethinking on the unfavourable. This should recommend love to you, insofar as you are part of this world, and especially if you are a thinker. Their unity is God. God develops through the uniting of both principles in you (me). I do not become God through this, or become divine, but God becomes human. He becomes apparent in you and through you as a child.”

From Arcanum 3 – Hermes, fish, Sun

Here, every great Sage agrees. We all have this direct experience, for life is nothing other. I cannot understand what humans argue about. Yet the developing of the divine dialogue has a surface crust: the arguments.

“If you will both the love and the forethinking, you become God. If you do this, the God is born and seizes possession of the will of men and holds his will in his childs’ hand … he will take the divided will in his hands of a child, whose will is simple and beyond being split.”

Isaiah 1958 – detail

The Isaiah drawing again – the child plays by the hole of the asp, holding the snake. He says it is unbelievable how men falsify and lie to themselves. “You can’t learn it through description, it can only become in you. … You should not learn my way but your own. My way leads me to me and not to you.”

Jung had a vision of the war, that it was a human self sacrifice, for in it he completed in himself the mystery of the Christ. He was a lion encircled by a serpent – “an image of fate, eternally renewing itself”. The spirit of the depths had a need to let the blood, through the spirit of the times. The long footnote reviews Elijah and Salome, and how love looks further than what it immediately seeks.

“The wonder happened (through Elijah) that my previously blind pleasure became sighted. My pleasure was blind, and it was love. Since my strongest willing willed self-sacrifice, my pleasure changed, it went into a higher principle, which in God is one with forethinking … … Love wants what is furthest, the best and the fulfilling.”

Tarot Key 8 – Lady with Lion – soul strength

There is a great deal more on this. It is topical, and it attunes also to my meeting with Enoch who taught me heaven’s Law of Sacrificeor Translation. The giver receives in full.

Two pigeons court and kiss and nibble on a bough in the tree outside. Here, my songs in your tree are lovebirds. Their pleasure, warm grey breast to breast on branch, has no end. I fetched my camera and focused; and at that instant, they parted, and they preen themselves.

My copy (below) of Figure IV from the original in the Most Holy Trinosofia took a couple of days. By drawing these figures, I come into relationship with them, and to understand their mystery. In the original’s low-res facsimile online, the outlines are blurred.

The Trinosofia text of Chapter Four is in the title bar, above. As I worked into the drawing, the coiled serpent, Cup and Sword in sheath came into focus. These are powerful symbols. Taking them into my inner life, they come to Life. I go over and over the colours until they are rich and strong together, and begin to speak.

The green snake coiled twelve times in the shape of a cone, suggests the Zodiac, and forms an altar. Actually it is twisted about a spear – I didn’t realise this till nearly the end; I thought the spear’s shaft was the snake’s dragon tail.

The cone-coiled Kundalini has been in my inner eye for some weeks now.

I had a problem also with the Cup, until I realised its base stands on the serpent, whose coil is the altar.

I wrote in my journal: “A musician who plays well, has to practice a lot. The prodigy is a quality of INTENSITY – of an intense commitment. The intensity is of a certain kind. It is where the intellect is transfigured through deep feeling … the point ( … seeking words for this!) – is always this moment sinking back into the root of the slow breath, a silent kindling, like a pyre. The wood glows and flows. The sacrament opens the back of my neck and shoulders: a living phoenix.”

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phoenix copy from trinosofia

I associated the phoenix with Master R long before I found it in the Trinosofia. Since last October when I drew this bird, the archetype is powerful and transformative in my life.

A silent sage in his cave, reaches further into life than all the talking gurus. An individual reaching the subtle level, begins to dissolve. The point of dissolution, of dissolving, in Alchemy, is the white ash becoming the Bird. Its song has tremendous subtle energy and commitment: the translation of varied densities of life to an element that nourishes the human community. Today’s coiled serpent has red phoenix wings, half opened. It supports a Cup, next to a Blade – the sheathed Sword. Master R knew Indian Alchemy, and his Shakti-Siva archetypes – but he wasn’t telling. In his day, the serpent had rather a bad press, it was considered unregenerate. In our day, it is Yoga.

Manly P Hall’s comment is illumining: “The twelve coils of the snake are emblematic of the philosophic year and the spiral course of the sun through the Zodiacal constellations. In the preparation of the Wise Man’s Stone, the elements pass through twelve stages of augmentation. In each of these cycles, the power of the matter is intensified, a fact which is suggested by the increasing size of the serpent’s spirals. The figure is also reminiscent of what the sages termed the philosophic vortex – the natural form of the soul power in the human body.

facsimile of the original

“Beside this strange altar stands the jewelled sword. Faintly traceable upon its sheath are the ancient symbols of the eye, the heart and mouth – life in the heart, light in the eye, breath in the mouth. The life, the light and the breath are the sources of all things, and from their union in the cruciform symbol, the candidate must fashion the weapon for his protection against the elemental darkness. The cycle symbol must be overcome by wisdom. This is the “Sword of quick decision” by which the Oriental neophyte must cut low the snaky branches of the world banyan tree, the emblem of the self-replenishing cycles and the law of rebirth.

“The serpent is the spiral of evolution; the cup contains the shining Nirvanic sea into which the soul is finally merged; the sword is the illumined will – the same sword which solves the enigma of life’s Gordion knot by cutting it with a single stroke.”

Rosicrucean Emblem – In Thy Valorous Strength

In Master R’s interior journey – see Trinosofia Texts in the title bar and scroll down to Chapter 4 – the traveller walks through fire – the desire nature – which doesn’t burn him ; and strikes the bronze snake a resounding blow. The walls of the globe around him, fall away into space, and the traveller is lifted swiftly up through the demons of the underworld. He scatters them with the cruciform sword and bursts from Hades into the light of day.

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Manly P Hall again, on the alchemical philosophy: “The circular space is a distilling vessel which stands in the midst of the furnace flame. The serpent represents elements within the retort, and the candidate portrays other elements which have the power to dissolve and corrode the serpent. The rising of the candidate upward through the walls of the globe here signifies the vapours which, ascending through the long neck of the distilling vessel, escape from the heated inferno below.”

In the elder Trinity the Cup is the woman, the Sword the man, and the snake is Life’s electro-magnetic current or force-field. In the Trinosofia’s Chapter 5, they will transpose to the Altar, Bird and Torch. See also my earlier post, The Yeast and the Grape.

Altar, bird, torch

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On the Everlastingness“The spirit of this time has condemned us to haste. You have no more futurity and no more past if you serve the spirit of this time. We need the life of eternity. We bear the future and the past in the depths. The future is old and the past is young. You serve the spirit of this time, and believe that you are able to escape the spirit of the depths. But the depths do not hesitate any longer, and will force you into the mysteries of Christ.”

Philemon and C.G.Jung – THE RED BOOK

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Here is Violin Sonata No.2, by Master R in his Comte de St Germain persona, during a London visit (circa mid 1750s). The opening movement has a beautiful serenity.

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May the Life, the Light and the Breath be in and of our work.

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Aquariel – an angel of the waters and of the air through the woods of life.